40 Days of Pain - Day 10

All of this effort is starting to catch up with me a little, which I expected to happen. I lost a little momentum today when my wife Jen woke up not feeling well. I took our son Peyton for a few hours so she could sleep. Happily when she woke up she was feeling better and Peyton and I had a good time playing, but I didn't get to work until 2 or 3 hours later than I normally start. As a result I had kind of an off day points wise.

So far I've earned 48,600 points in 10 days and I've won $3,300 during that time period. This is great news since I was thinking it would be OK if I just broke even or lost a little bit during the 40 days.

In other good news pokerstars in effect gave me a little raise today. I'll try to explain in as unconfusing a way as I can (I do use the acronym "FPP" 24 times in this post!). What I call "Points" on this blog are what pokerstars refers to as "Base FPPs" (with FPP standing for frequent player point).

One of the great benefits of being a supernova is for every base FPP I earn I get 3.5 regular FPPs while the players with the lowest level of VIP status only get 1 FPP per base FPP (poor bastards!). Everything in the FPP store as well as tournaments that you can buy into with FPPs are all listed in regular FPPs.

Another of the great benefits of being a supernova is I can trade my FPPs in for cash at an excellent rate. Players of other levels of status are forced to buy merchandise in the FPP store or trade their FPPs in for cash at an absurdly poor rate.

For example if you are a "silverstar" player you can get $50 in cash for 5,000 FPPs or 100 FPPs per dollar. If you're goldstar you can get $285 for 25,000 FPPs or 88 FPPs per dollar.

As a Supernova I've been able to get $1,500 in cash for 100,000 FPPs or 66.7 FPPs per dollar. Those of you who are super quick at math will have figured out that the 48,600 points I've earned in the past 10 days translate into 170,100 FPPs which at that rate are worth $2,552.22.

Pretty amazing huh? Seems like pokerstars is pretty generous doesn't it? How can they stay in business just giving out thousands of dollars like this? Well I've paid them about $9,000 in fees in the past 10 days and there just giving me some of my own money back! Can you belive it! $9,000 in 10 days! It means I've actually beaten the other players out of $12,300. Amazing.

Back to the point. Today I noticed that they had a new FPP for cash deal in the FPP store. Specifically, I can now buy $4,000 for 250,000 FPPs which is 62.5 FPPs per dollar. It might not seem like going from 66.7 per dollar to 62.5 per dollar is a huge deal. But it means that the 170,100 FPPs I've made are now worth $2,721.60. That's a free $169! That's like finding a pile of money that has 8 twenties, a five and 4 ones! It feels like I should go out and buy myself 8 DVDs and some KFC!

More importantly over the course of all of next year (I won't run you through all the math on this one) it will be an extra $4,282 in my pocket! It's pretty amazing how that small difference makes a big difference! Thanks pokerstars!